The Simple Site Design Blog

Website Design Usability How-To Guide

By: Michael Cordova

Website design usability improvements can double sales and visitor satisfaction, and site visitor satisfaction means extra return visits. A company’s website is many times the first experience with that company so usability and a quality user experience is critically important to a company’s online Internet success.

Typical websites have usability issues which put off potential clients leaving them with confusion and frustration. This can all be corrected. This how-to guide is intended for a new website, or those that have a website that doesn’t perform to their expectations.

Usability – The Numbers

• Forrester Research studies estimate that 50 percent of potential sales are lost because visitors can’t find sought after information and 40 percent of visitors do not return to a site after a negative first experience.
• According to Jakob Nielsen usability expert, web site re-design based on usability standards can increase online sales by 100%
• Usability projects can return 5-10 times their expense within 12 months.
• A comprehensive usability project can improve website results by 83%. Since competitors will probably incorporate some of the changes you implemented, this can settle out to 68%.

Page Layout And Structure Usability

• Web design quality increases credibility – just do it
• Error free HTML (or XHTML) and CSS ensures uniform cross-browser page rendering. A discombobulated web page will kill your credibility.
• Whitespace usage increases comprehension by 20%
• Golden Triangle is important. That is the top-left of the page above the fold (before scrolling). Jakob Nielsen’s user scrolling study showed that 23% of visitors scroll on their first website visit.
• Faces not looking at you – if a face image is looking somewhere other than directly at us, we’ll also look in the same direction. Take advantage of this by drawing your users’ attention to the most important parts of your page or ad.
• Search box size counts – a 27 character search box shows all search text in 90% of searches according to Jakob Neilsen
• Header and footer should be separated from the main content.

Usability and Website Navigation

• Consistent Navigation – make sure navigation appears in the same location on web pages
• Text is king – use descriptive text in navigation links, not images, java applets or flash
• Location feedback – provide the user with information about where they are with colors, breadcrumbs or hyperlink styles
• Sitemaps – provide a visitor sitemap with a website outline and your most important links
• Calls to action or navigation boxes can’t look like ads because users automatically skip over them
• Home page navigation placed on the top of pages performs best

Usability and Text Characteristics

• Dominant headlines will draw the visitors eye immediately
• Headlines first words must grab your visitors attention immediately. If they are keywords then you also get an SEO benefit out of it.
• Headings, subheads, date/times and phone numbers should be used and formatted consistently. Using a logical progression of h1, h2, h3, etc. tags helps the web site visitors understanding of the page hierarchy and is also a great accessibility feature.
• Standard fonts of 12 points or more optimize reading speeds
• A white background with black text increases reading speeds up to 32%
• Sentence case (only first word capitalized) is important for comprehension and reading speed
• Bold and italics should be used sparingly, and ideally only to emphasize keywords ultra-relevant to the topic

Link Definition Usability

• Blue anchor links are the standard color for links
• Underline links – this is also standard and good for accessibility reasons
• Visited links should be a different, more pale color
• Text link hover color should light up the link with brighter colors
• Red or green links should be avoided due to the number of people that are color blind
• Do not underline any text that is not a link
• Do not show normal text in text link colors
• Do not use bolding as a hover effect. Bolding text will cause the text to re-align.
• Link title attributes can be used for the hover effect to describe where the link is going – also a great accessibility feature
• Link text should describe the target page
• Tabindex is a great method to define logical tabbing through elements
• Menu links should usually not follow the above rules

Usability and Writing Standards

• Write to be scanned – web site visitors don’t read long paragraphs. Keep paragraphs to 3 sentences, group logically and provide succinct information.
• Bullet points should be used as much as possible
• Bold and italics should be used for your most important words. This is also a big SEO factor – search engines rank your page higher when you emphasize targeted keywords.

Author Resource:-> Michael Cordova writes about technology and builds WordPress SEO web sites. He has been practicing Internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) since the beginning of the Internet. BEFORE YOU GO call Michael at (303) 744-2178 for a free initial SEO web site evaluation or contact him from the links above.
Article Provided By: Published-Articles.com Article Directory

By Herman Drost

Many site owners make the mistake of building a website without laying out a clear plan for their online business. This is a sure set-up for failure. There are 1000s of abandoned sites on the web due to lack of careful planning. Before designing your website you should ask yourself some questions to avoid making mistakes down the road.

10 frequently asked questions (FAQ) about designing a website

1. What are your business goals?

It’s easy to say ” I want to make money,” however this is not a great motivator. Think of a deeper motivation that you feel passionate about e.g. “I want to have the financial freedom to spend more time with my kids as they are growing up.”

2. What’s the purpose of your website?

This is the question most visitors will ask when accessing your website. Your home page must clearly explain the purpose and benefits of the products and/or services you are offering.

3. What type of products or services will you sell?

Research the marketability of your products or services by doing keyword research. Use the free Google Keyword Tool to find out how many searches your main keywords receive every month. If there are no searches it means there is not much demand and therefore not worth marketing.

If it is a very competitive market (millions of searches per month) it may be difficult to stand out from your competitors and create a profitable online business.

4. How many products will you sell from your website?

This will determine how many pages your website will have. If you’re only selling one product or service you may only need 4 web pages e.g. Home, Product (or Services), About, Contact. If you’re selling 100s of items you will need a database driven site to store and manage all of them.

5. How many variables does your product have?

Variables may include size, color, type, sku#, shipping, tax? Make sure your shopping cart allows you to include these variables.

6. How will you accept online payments?

To accept credit card payments online, you will need a shopping cart, merchant account, payment gateway and SSL certificate for secure transactions. This means you will have monthly fees and processing fees every time a customer purchases something from your website.

A less expensive option for accepting payments online is the Paypal shopping cart. You don’t need to purchase a separate merchant account, shopping cart, payment gateway and secure certificate. For a small processing fee it takes care of all this in one place.

7. Do you have a web hosting plan?

Your website needs to be hosted on a server for it to be available online. Select a hosting plan that has sufficient space for all your files and bandwidth to receive 1000s of visitors each month. Make sure you have the flexibility to upgrade your plan should you need more space and bandwidth.

Editor’s Note: I use and recommend HostMonster for hosting. This site is hosted on a HostMonster Server.

8. Will you need to maintain the website yourself?

Asking this question before the design will determine what software your designer will use to build your website. If it only consists of a few web pages which don’ need regular updating, then use software such as Dreamweaver to build it. It creates clean code and you will have only a few files.

If your website has 100s of pages consider a content management system such as WordPress, Joomla or Zen Cart. They all enable 100s of items to be stored in a database. The website can be managed (add, edit or delete items or pages) by logging into an administration area.

9. Do you have a marketing plan?

To create a profitable online business you must create a plan to promote it. Some methods may include, search engine marketing, pay per click, article marketing, press releases, social media, video marketing, etc. Website promotion needs to be done frequently and consistently to be effective.

10. How will you monitor your website statistics?

Check if your web hosting plan includes site statistics (e.g. AW Stats). If not create a Google Analytics account and insert the code on your web pages. It will track how many daily, weekly, monthly, yearly visitors you receive, where they are coming from and what keywords are being used to find your site in the search engines.

If you answer these 10 questions first you’ll avoid the pitfalls of designing and building a website and increase your potential of creating a profitable online business.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Herman_Drost
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This video has simple in the name so I present it here. When using a header image such as this you need to take extra steps so that the search engines will know your site name. Also always use the alternate text with images and graphics. Search robots can not read text in images and don’t see the images themselves. They will pick up your alt text, however.

by Nievo Jan Babay

In the previous decade, flash web design has been the go-to format for many designers, developers and companies. It gives your site a sleek, suave, and superbly aesthetic aura. Flash is a web format used to display content on a web browser. It allows you to graphically present a web page more attractively contrary to the text-based HTML coded approach to creating a page. It also allows animation on banners, website titles, and even menus. In short, it is a graphic plus factor to use flash. But it has ups and downs that webmasters should know about.

On top of the advantages mentioned earlier, if you are using flash in your website, you have this reputation of being “cool” and top of the line. It works best for company websites that cater to the entertainment, gaming, or fashion industry.

Get Information about Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5

There are websites built entirely of flash. Websites of bands or recording companies use this format. A particular advantage is the hidden embedding of audio files since these are audio related websites. You cannot easily grab or get the source code of the site as opposed to an HTML written website that displays the source code.

But flash is not for everyone though. Since it is not a text based format, it is unfriendly to search engines, making it difficult, if not impossible, to be seen on Google results. Blogs, news sites, portals, online stores, review websites and the like are those that work best in non-flash formats.

It is not bad to use flash though. You have to know the nature of your website before deciding on using the format. You can still use flash on some parts of your site like perhaps your header. Knowing these ups and downs should help you in balancing your site’s aesthetics and visibility in search engines.

About the Author:

Nievo Jan Babay is an seo specialist Philippines and offers cheap seo submission services. Visit his blog for more information at Nievo.net.

Article Courtesy of: Go Articles

I am putting up this blog in conjunction with my Symmetrical Backgrounds website. I will bring you articles and thoughts about web design on these pages. I hope that you will find something of value to you here.

I am not a professional web designer. I have an interest in website building and have gained some experience with my sites over the past few years. I hope to share some of the knowledge that I have gained as well as present a collection of articles that I think will be of value to many people.

Symmetrical Backgrounds is my site offering free background images to use in web designs. I make these tiling images using the Irfanview photo editor. The images produce a seamless background, many with intricate designs. The backgrounds on the blog are all images and available from the main site. I invite you to visit the main background image site while you are here.

I have installed the KeyWordLuv plug-in along with a Do Follow plug-in. I welcome a dialog with my readers. I do manually approve all comments and I have activated Akismet for comment spam filtering. I have a comment policy posted. Comment spam is a real problem on a popular blog, but I do welcome quality comments that directly relate to a post.